The banality of evil

I thought this editorial by Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald was a rather sound response to the furore surrounding Prince Harry's recent swastika moment.

Excerpt:

It is unclear whether Harry knows anything about Europe in the 1930s and 1940s or, more broadly, about totalitarian regimes - fascist, Nazi and communist alike. If he is ignorant of these matters, then it is possible that he has been influenced by the modern word usage which regards the terms "fascist", "Nazi" and "Stalinist" as mere weapons of abuse, devoid of any historical meaning.

p/s. The title of this post, the banality of evil, is actually part of the title of a book by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and gave some insight into how the nazi regime was made out of some very ordinary people, but put in that particular system or situation, came to do extraordinarily terrible things.